Women in Marathons

A look at how women's participation in marathons across the country has increased over the years.

It's easy to see that women's participation in marathons has come a long way since Katherine Switzer first ran Boston in 1972, but just how many women are running marathons now, and when did they start?

According to Running USA's 2013 Marathon Report, women have gone from being just 11% of all marathon finishers in 1980 to 42% in 2012. That's a huge increase, and made me wonder when exactly it happened and, also, whether the growth looked different at different marathons throughout the country.

To find out, I gathered finisher data from four large marathons across the country. Here is a chart representing the percentage of finishers by women in each of them. You can see that the growth was fairly constant with no major spikes, and also it happened at roughly the same rate in all four races surveyed.

The percentage continues to rise across the board and gets ever closer to 50%. It will be fun to look back in another decade or two and see where these lines have ended up.

For those of you number geeks out there wanting the raw data, the following table lists the number of women finishers each year for the four marathons surveyed. The empty cells represent years that data was unavailable—women may have been running.